InHouse: Nurse Jeffrey Appisodes – “The Bitch Tapes #2″

In "Bitch Tape #2" of the Nurse Jeffrey Appisodes, Nurse Jeffrey gets his hands even dirtier in his efforts to defile the great Dr. House. This week he aims his sights on a lab technician who House asked to do an emergency panel and look for hidden cancer. As it turns out, House was really looking for a hidden STD… for a hooker (“and tigers and bears, oh, my!” exclaims Nurse Jeffrey). Although how the tech knew the hooker was wearing “do-me five-inch pumps and no underwear” is something that is never explained. Would House really have brought his ‘lady of choice’ into the labs of Princeton-Plainsboro and hold a conversation with her about condoms and venereal disease in front of everyone? It seems a bit beyond the realm of something even he would do.

In the end our beleaguered Nurse Jeffrey is skunked again when the tech reveals House legitimized the tests by keeping a file on his ‘patient.’ As far as the hospital is concerned, House ran an STD test on a patient who requested same. Poor Nurse Jeffrey. It seems House has covered his tracks well and you must continue your quest to bring the great man down.

Credit where credit is due on these Appisodes is really a must. Let's hear about the writers, producers, and directors who worked on this project. And who are the fine actors portraying the folks who make up the hospital staff? The Nurse Jeffrey Appisodes continue to be a fun way to spend three minutes of your Monday night.

A week before the Appisodes began, the InHouse app ran an interview with House staff writer Russel Friend in which he discussed the season six finale. The interview appeared after my update ran, so I’ve decided to cover it here.

The idea to create an episode where House is forced to enter a collapsed building to save a life came to Mr. Friend over a year ago. At the time he wondered if it would be possible to do an episode of this scope on network TV because of time constraints and financial concerns. Fortunately the studio and network were on board with the story.

It took three or four months to construct the building, tunnel, city street, brownstones, crushed cars, and the ‘hole’ where House’s patient Hannah was trapped. The completed set took up an entire soundstage.

The season, Mr. Friend explains, starts from the time House enters Mayfield, after which he makes a valiant effort to put the lessons he learned there to good use. It was a season long quest for happiness. But in the finale things changed; we see House going to a dark place, literally and metaphorically. When he enters the collapsed building and this hole where his patient Hannah is trapped, he has reached his lowest point. Here he has to tell Hannah he needs to amputate her leg, an incredibly difficult decision he didn’t want to have to make for her in the present, and one he refused to make for himself in the past. This, Mr. Friend, says led to a very dark ending.

“It’s been a couple of weeks since I recorded my last video blog,” Mr. Friend tells us after a cut. And now he lets the viewers in on a little secret: the ending they were going to film and the ending we actually saw were quite different. On the last day of filming, in the dead of night, a new scene was sprung on everyone. He describes the scene as being controversial. We know now, of course, that the ending was the beginning of the long-awaited (by some) beginning of the House-Cuddy relationship.

Another late entry into the app is a Media Room feature, which focuses on the alternate teaser opening in the season finale. The segment opens on Greg Yaitanes, House executive producer/director, standing in the middle of the organized chaos of the aftermath of the crane collapse, explaining how it was a tough creative decision to not to start the episode with the typical teaser. When the opportunity presented itself to open up on House they couldn’t say no to it. They did have a pretty spectacular opening planned, showing the hows and whys of the catastrophe, and involved a VFX sequence of the crane operation. Fascinating visuals accompany Mr. Yaitanes’ description of this never produced alternate teaser: a computerized first person look at what the crane operator experienced as the crane fell onto streets and buildings.

Visual effects supervisor, Elan Soltes, takes over from here, describing and illustrating with exclusive computer graphic footage, what this teaser would have looked like had it been used. We are shown the initial mock-up and the research that went into creating it. This portion of the piece is a mere minute and thirty seconds long but a great deal of information is condensed into that short window of time. Those interested in video effects might want to view this piece more than once.

Once again the InHouse app has proven itself to be a shining addition to the House universe.